Tech to Prevent Collateral Injuries

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The United States has a responsibility to ensure minimal civilian casualties during airstrikes, including those conducted by allies and coalition nations.

Collateral damage involves the incidental killing or wounding of non-combatants or damage to non-combatant property during an attack on a legitimate military target.

The US Defense Department is looking for cutting-edge technologies that can be declassified to help international partners prevent incidental civilian injuries and death.

To that end, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency is looking for technologies that can reduce collateral injuries and deaths during strikes — and, specifically, unclassified tech that can be shared with other countries.

According to the request for information (RFI), the Department is asking for industry feedback on the best ways to achieve two goals, according to defenseone.com:

• Improve foreign countries’ capacity to effectively employ strike capabilities in a manner that distinguishes between military objectives and civilians.
• Develop and integrate principles and techniques on the protection of civilians in relevant partner force standard operating procedures, encouraging and enabling a partner to avoid civilian casualties in the context of military operations.

The requirement is for technological solutions that will directly reduce the potential for civilian casualties, such as advanced targeting. These would include “unclassified software and other tools that assist with targeting and collateral damage estimates for military operations, including technology capabilities that would assist in the effective use of air-launched weapons—[precision-guided munitions] or unguided bombs—and/or analyze potential collateral damage based on a specific weapon employment scenario.”

The document offers four hypothetical cases, including:

A program that could be given to a partner nation’s air force that calculates the best way to use guided missiles to avoid civilian casualties in a specific scenario; or a technology that would help an intelligence analyst work out the best way to use an “air-launched weapon” to destroy or disable a target. That analysis would include the desired point of impact, probability of damage, angle of attack and fusing determinations, along with a calculation of potential harm to civilians.